


just dragonflies

by boxedblondes



Series: people who weep for the death of rivers [2]
Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Canon-typical shenanigans, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Introspection, M/M, POV Second Person, The briefest and barest mention of Boris's fuck-me pumps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-10-29 14:02:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20797793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxedblondes/pseuds/boxedblondes
Summary: It’s not his fault he had to leave home, leave Vegas, leave you. You know this. It doesn’t make it hurt any less to know that he’s gone for good.Or, the boy and the desert and the painting and everything in between.





	just dragonflies

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to my fic [little remissions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20679233) from Boris's perspective, but you absolutely can read either one as a standalone.
> 
> Title from "Codex" by Radiohead

i. After Vegas, for many long years, you wander the Earth like a lost soul, something vagrant and lonely. The things you do, the people you see, the places you go, and the life you build for yourself – it all feels like something happening to someone else, like the world exists entirely beyond you. A fugue state, a dissociative haze.

Nothing you do _matters_, not really. You are not a real person after all.

ii. There are many things you never said to him, words you swallowed down and stored away deep inside yourself. Things that were too painful, too revealing, too secret to share with another soul – even one as connected to yours as his was.

Things like _I’m sorry _and _I love you_ and _I wish I had met you sooner, before I was too fucked-up for my own good_.

Because even at fourteen, at fifteen, you were a mess, headed straight down a collision course toward some indistinct point of no return. Even at your youngest and most innocently altruistic, taking care of this strange fragile boy in the heat of the desert, you were never going to rack up enough good karma to rid yourself of all your sins.

_I would have done anything for you_, you think now. _I would have done anything you asked_.

You still would, quite frankly. If he were to turn up at your doorstep – (And how could he? You’re the one who stopped answering texts. You’re the one who ran away like a felon, which, yeah. Maybe you are. But still.) – a lankier, looser, better-dressed version of the boy you once knew, you think you’d confess everything.

On the nights you can’t sleep, gripped by some mortal sort of terror that always feels more permanent in the moment than it probably, actually is, you torment yourself with wondering when, exactly, he found out you had the painting.

You imagine him on a Greyhound bus to nowhere, peeling back a corner of the newspaper for just a tiny peek and discovering, right there inside a metallic nightmare, what you’ve done. Alternately, you imagine him turning himself into the art cops, marching right up to some police station or something and telling them he took the painting, holding out the taped-up package like a Christmas gift. You imagine a mustachioed policeman taking it from his hands, gentle as if he were holding a newborn baby and unwrapping it with all the precision of a surgeon. You imagine his gruff stoicism melting into hysterics as he laughs down at the Civics book. _You almost had me there, kid!_

You imagine him going home, utterly embarrassed and thoroughly confused, and downing a glass of his antique man’s furniture polish like it’s soda. You imagine him frothing at the mouth, convulsing on the carpet, choking to death on his own sorrow and disbelief. You wonder if he’ll think of you when he dies – just for a fleeting moment, just a word or two. _Fuck you, Boris_, you think he’d say in this self-flagellating fantasy of yours, this bête noire of the darkest sort.

At this point in your nighttime ruminations, the panic starts to reach pathologic levels and you find yourself choking, too – on the bitter salt of regret and the curdled guilt that sits heavy in your gut. _I’m sorry_, you say until you pass out from exhaustion. In your head and out loud and in all the spaces in between.

_I’m sorry_. _Please forgive me_. _I’m sorry._

But in your head, in your heart, he’s already dead and gone on the floor and your words fall as light and airy as snow upon his body.

iii. When you’re eleven, you need to have your appendix taken out. The doctors give you a whole bottle of chalky white pills that stick to the back of your throat no matter how much water you swallow them down with.

You hate them at first and refuse to take them, but within the first twenty-four hours, the pain around your stitches is so bad you’re forced to give in. You take two because if one does the trick, surely two will take the pain away twice as fast. Which turns out to be true enough, but your body is so weak and your tolerance is exactly zero, so there’s also the surprising side effect of you getting high out of your fucking mind.

It’s the first time but it certainly will not be the last.

You spend a glorious few hours just lying flat on your back in the middle of your bed, staring up at the ceiling and feeling the calmest you think you’ve ever felt in your entire life. Nothing hurts, and it is the most beautiful feeling.

iv. The first time you find Theo lying in the road, it’s like a nightmare in slow motion. One minute you’re lazing on the concrete by the pool in the darkest part of the evening and the next you’re blinking up out of some half-sleeping daydream to the sudden unexplainable absence of another human being next to you.

When you call for him he doesn’t answer and that, more than anything, makes your heart start to pound in your chest. He always answers you, _always_. You run like a crazy person around the front of the house and down to the sidewalk, terrified all the while that he’s somehow vanished not just from the yard, but also from the whole of existence.

You worry, fleetingly and with an adrenaline-shaky jolt in your stomach, that maybe you’ve made him up in your head. That he was never real at all.

Except, of course, he is. And you find him where you least expect him, lying spread-eagled in the very middle of the street, eyes closed behind fingerprint-smudged glasses.

_Potter!_ you call to him, breath trembly from nerves. _What the fuck are you doing lying in street? _

His eyes blink open slowly just as you reach him, dropping to a crouch beside his supine form. It’s like he too is coming out of a dream, something hazy and unfocused in his gaze before he snaps back into focus.

_I want to die_, he says simply, and your blood runs cold.

_Potter, why?_ you say.

_There’s no one out there who loves me_, he says in response.

You fight the urge to shake him and say, _What about me? What about me? _Instead, you lie down beside him in the road and let your hand creep closer and closer to his until it brushes against his thigh like an accident. He doesn’t push you away.

v. Another night, all too similar to every one before it. You lie on your side, overly aware of your every breath, and watch the steady, languorous rise and fall of Theo’s ribcage. He did not try to kill himself tonight. Of course, that means you’re feeling the urge creep up your own spine, breathing hot and heavy in your ear.

You try to think of a reasonable way to wake him up and ask him to put his hands around your throat and cut off your breathing – not for long enough to die, just enough to go cold with the fear of _what-if_.

Unfortunately for you, Theo’s not a naturally violent person. For all his bluster and all his fucked-up genetics, he’s the gentlest person you’ve ever met. Which makes it all the sweeter when you fire off a joke just right and something in him cracks – a deep, jagged line cutting through his self-restraint – and he punches you right in the face.

This is the only way you know how to say _I love you_, with barbed words and bloodied knuckles. It feels natural, normal to brawl in the sand and dust, yet to be too soft with him – or worse, to let him be soft towards you – feels worse than sin. It feels like an apocalypse.

Worse still, somewhere deep in the recesses of your subconscious, down where the nastiness of the world can’t touch it, you have the fervent, persistent desire to let that tenderness win out over the violence.

Theo shifts in his sleep and something warm rises in your throat at the sight of his slack face, unburdened by the weight of the world for a few precious hours. It’s ugly, inevitable, this way that you feel about him. Maybe God or your father or somebody will strike you down where you lie, smite you out of existence and put an end to all your suffering. Maybe Theo himself will wake up and catch you staring at him, watching him like he’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Maybe he’ll call you names and hit you, or else choke you out like you were thinking about only a few minutes ago.

Perhaps he’ll kiss you instead. Then you won’t need your father to come and kill you; your pounding heart will do the job for you.

vi. The night he shows you the painting starts off just like any other. Vodka. Vicodin. Stale chips and flat soda. Low-budget action movies with too many explosions and not enough gore.

When he looks at you, alcoholic glimmer like a curtain over his eyes, it is with a heartbreaking expression – something at once fearful and shy, earnest in excess. It makes you feel hot all over until you’re sure your face is burning with it.

The thoughts that are running through your head are enough to make you want to die just to not have to think them. You’ve been having them for weeks now, all variations on the same guilty theme. There’s something wrong growing inside you, burrowing under your skin. You just know it.

_I want to show you something_, Theo says and you feel it like a razorblade against your skin.

_Oh god_, you think, _oh god_.

When he gets up from the couch and begins the arduous climb up the stairs to his room, you are at first thrown for a loop so large you feel dizzy. Then, belatedly, you wonder if he meant for you to follow him. But no, of course not, because next thing you know he’s coming down the stairs with a ratty pillowcase in tow. 

Does he mean to suffocate you with it? For the things you thought when he looked at you? No, that’s ridiculous. You may both be two halves of one immensely fucked-up soul, but neither of you can read minds, as far as you know.

Given a million tries, could you have ever have guessed that this poncy city boy, the saddest soul you’ve ever known, had been harboring _this _big of a secret for so long? Probably not, you imagine. 

_How did you get that thing past TSA?_ is the first thing you think to ask, shortly followed by _Is it for real?_

The answers to those questions are, respectively, _I have no fucking clue_ and _Obviously, you dumbass_.

You’ve never seen a famous painting outside of an art museum. You suppose no one has, really. The surrealness of the experience takes your breath away. Up close, in the weak yellow glow from the floor lamp next to the television, you can see every tiny brushstroke on the canvas. You wonder how long it took to paint it. You wonder how one even _begins _to paint such a thing.

Several long, long moments pass before you work up enough of a voice to say, _Is beautiful_. Quiet, reverent. _Most beautiful thing I have ever seen_.

Theo looks at you with tears starting to gather on the edges of his lashes. _This is my heart_, his gaze seems to say. _This is everything I am now_.

For the rest of your life, you know you will have to try to find a way to live with the burden of those unspoken words.

vii. It happens like a fever dream, like a rushed confession. Moonlight on bare skin. Chlorine burning bright and acrid in your nostrils. The knobs of his spine cool and smooth under your palms.

You don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’tthinkaboutitdon’td o n ’ t d o n ‘ t – and then there’s too much happening all at once and you can’t really think about anything at all.

In the morning, you start dry-heaving almost before you’re even really awake. You lock the bathroom door behind you because you can’t let him see you like this. After you’re done throwing up and you’re half-blind from the tears pouring down your face, you turn on the shower and stand under the ice-cold water until you’re shaking so hard you almost bite through your tongue.

You swear you’ll never let anything like last night ever happen again. You break that promise the next day, because you’re weak and so, so desperate for anything that will make you feel less lonely.

It becomes a regular thing, you and Theo and all your secrets sharing his tiny twin-size bed. Always Potter’s house, never yours. He tries once, to start something in your own bedroom, and you punch him square in the jaw. You’re scared to death of your father and all his unbridled rage, but in that moment, with Potter looking so small and sad – like _you_ of all people have betrayed him, the last thing he ever expected – you think maybe there are worse things to be frightened of.

_Sorry, sorry_, you say, rushed and belated. It doesn’t matter – he doesn’t speak to you for several days anyway.

But what are you supposed to do? Risk your life for him in this particular, very specific way when you’re already risking it in a hundred other ways?

There’s nothing that motivates you more than a good high, so you find a girl who can get you one – and then get you a little something more – and before you know it, you don’t have to worry about the whole Theo situation anymore because you’ve got Kotku now to help you work through your teenage hormones. And Kotku, too, to score you weed and coke and LSD, anything and everything you could ever ask for.

And if you still dream about unwashed sheets and dog fur and the smell of bodies that have spent all day out in the sun? Well. That’s between you and yourself. Besides, it’s not like you ever really remember them in the morning.

viii. You say goodbye on a street corner, car exhaust in your lungs and sand swirling around your feet. There’s a wild look in Theo’s eye, raw and alive and unhinged.

He’s so determined to go and _please _and _come on, Boris_ and you can’t say yes because of the painting – because you _took it_, this vital, central piece of him – but you can’t say no without breaking your own heart into smithereens.

Either way, he’s going to hate you. Either way, you’re never going to see him again.

You know better than anybody, better than him even, that you’re the only thing that’s been keeping him alive all these months. Without you, in New York City, there’s a thousand ways for him to die and for you to go the rest of your life wondering – but never _knowing_ – if he’s okay.

There’s nothing left to do but gather his face in both your hands and press your mouth to his, trying to convey every miserable little thing you’re feeling right now. You’ve kissed people before but never anyone you truly loved, not like him at least. It’s alarming, disarming, the intensity of it all. The desire to hold him and keep him safe forever warring with the knowledge that you need to turn away and let him go _now _or you never will.

It’s a terrible certainty, this feeling that you’re sending him out into the world to die, probably by his own hand.

_I won’t forget you_, you tell him, the most solemn pronouncement you can possibly make in this moment. It’s as good as an “I do” as far as you’re concerned, to speak those words into existence in the space between both your faces.

_‘Til death do us part_, you think as you send him away towards his own funeral. The taxi cab blinks out of view on the horizon and you sit down on the curb to mourn.

ix. You don’t allow yourself to be angry with him. You do, only once, and it just about kills you.

It’s not his fault he had to leave home, leave Vegas, leave _you_. You know this. It doesn’t make it hurt any less to know that he’s gone for good.

It’s just that there’s nothing left for you here, no single other person, place, or thing to make life worth living. To set you free. You’re shackled here, just like his painting, that tiny, lonely bird. Shackled here _because of _the painting more like, tied to it forever and ever now. The person you should really be mad at is yourself, but anger just doesn’t work that way.

So you give yourself a full twenty-four hours to rage and scream and, yes, cry a little. You punch a mirror for the first and only time in your life, crack the glass until shards rain down on you and blood drips, warm and heavy, down the backs of your aching fists. You get absolutely shitfaced on boxed wine you stole from Xandra a few weeks back and lie in your room listening to the saddest Radiohead songs you know until you fall into a blackout dreamless sleep.

The next day you take all of those feelings – the rage and guilt and sadness and hopelessness, lost love and broken promises – and shove it all into a neat little box in the back of your mind, never to see the light of day again.

x. The rest of your life goes a little something like this: Shootouts. Drug deals. Making friends with the shadiest guys you can find and cracking all your best jokes until they trust you. Money, more than you’ve ever seen in one place. Literal, actual _piles _of cocaine and heroin. Nice people and other, not-so-nice ones. Europe and all its millennia-old grime tucked between the cobblestones.

And in the middle of it all, the painting.

xi. There’s something about the sight of food on a kitchen table that turns you absolutely feral. For all the places in the world you’ve called home – cities and towns and forlorn little villages like faded patches on a map – there have been few constants. The sharp, bright ache of hunger is one of them.

Perhaps this is why, as an adult, you find yourself constantly ravenous. For food, for money, for nice clothes and nice shoes, for someone to laugh with.

You still eat like a starving child, even at the ripe old age of twenty-five, by which point you should _definitely _know better. Anything that’s placed before you – you’ll gulp it down like it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted. And sometimes, miraculously, it is.

There’s a constant sort of emptiness to you, a growling desperation not only in your stomach, but also your entire being. You spend years and years trying to fill it, this gnawing hole, but nothing ever seems to work. Not drugs, not food, not even the touch of a beautiful woman.

So you fuck like a man with nothing left to lose, chug vodka like someone dying of thirst, eat every meal like it’s your last one on earth. You burn up and burn out, over and over and over again, without ever feeling warm. Without ever finding whatever it is you’re looking for.

Perhaps the best thing about all this money is your ability to actually _buy _things now, instead of stealing them from department stores and supermarket aisles like some kind of overgrown pickpocket. You find you have a weakness for nice suits and expensive shoes. There’s something about looking like you have it together on the outside that makes people think you’re not a complete mess on the inside. You take great care in your appearance now and you relish in the wastefulness and excess of it all.

So what if you want to buy a pair of €600 shoes just to keep them in your closet? You’re a grown man now and anything that will tame the hunger burning somewhere inside of you for just a moment is more than worth it.

xii. Many times, you are afraid for Theo. Only once are you ever afraid _of _him.

Something about seeing him again after all this time makes everything spill out of you like blood from a busted nose and before you know it, you’re telling him everything. The words just won’t stop, keep bubbling up your throat, over the tip of your tongue, and out into the world. If he’s about to kill you or beat you up, he should at least _know_… but you can’t dig up enough bravado even now, at the end of your life, to get that part out.

When he forces you back with him to the antiques shop, you have never been so sure in all your life that you’re going to die tonight. You should’ve known after everything that it would be him. _As it should be_, you think.

You put up a good enough fight, you think. If this Theo is still the kind Potter of your childhood at heart, your weak protests will be enough to give him pause. As it is, he absolutely _insists _on you coming back to his place. Ah, well. Let him sign your death certificate then.

He unlocks the front door with all the classic fumbling of a true alcoholic and you think to yourself that his acting skills have really and truly improved in the past decade. It’s an incredibly realistic performance, in your opinion. By the time he finally pushes the door open, you’re ready for just about anything on the other side. Strangely, there’s no one at all. You brace yourself, then, for the killing blow to come from behind you. Friendly fire.

But then. A screech, high and unholy. The distinct _pitter-patter _of little animal feet. And, oh. _Popchyk!_

As you tumble around on the floor with the little dog, two figures lumber out from the shadows. To your bewildered amusement, they sharpen into focus to become nothing more than an old man and an even older woman.

_Oh, Potter,_ you laugh to yourself. _No wonder you are still selling antiques. Cannot threaten a baby with these lackeys_.

It turns out, of course, that these are none other than Potter’s old poofter and his… friend? Hard to say. Point is, they are not here to hurt you and, apparently, neither is Theo.

_Are you alright?_ the old man asks you kindly as Potter races upstairs to collect something or other. _You were shaking like a leaf when you first got here._

_Was I?_ you say. It’s news to you. _Is very cold outside, no?_

Theo comes clattering down the stairs before the man gets a chance to answer. And just like that, the night is young again. You have your life and you have your Potter and everything is going to be okay.

Then you find out he doesn’t know about the painting, thinks he still has it locked away in some storage unit, and your heart plummets so fast and so far that you think you might pass out.

_Potter_, you want to say, hands on each of his shoulders. _Are you fucking kidding me?_

xiii. Antwerp. The culmination of the worst month of your life. A nightmare finally, _finally _coming to an end.

The little bird – safe and sound. Potter too, more or less. All your joy and relief plays out in you clearing your schedule to help Theo through his withdrawal before inviting him back to your drab little flat to have a proper almost-vacation.

Tonight, drunk on Belgium’s best whiskey, he’s suddenly remembered your newly-healed bullet wound and fixated upon it like a child with a small toy. _You were shot_, he says softly, hurt apparent in his voice.

_No big deal_, you say.

His eyes flash up at you in the near-dark. _It is_, he says insistently. _It’s a huge fucking deal_.

In your bedroom, the only room with windows that don’t face out onto a blank brick wall, he maneuvers you around on the bed until the weak moonlight illuminates the ugly gnarled spot on your upper arm. You’re coked out and doped up, and shivering neon lines streak across your vision when you turn your head too fast.

Between the drugs and the intensity of Theo’s gaze on your bare arm, you’re about half a breath from shaking apart into a million little pieces. He crawls practically half-on top of you to get a close enough look and braces an arm against your stomach, the tip of his elbow brushing somewhere in the vicinity of your inner thigh. With his other hand, he strokes a thumb along the raised edge of the scar.

_Does it hurt?_ he asks. Soft, soft. Back and forth. You’re convinced you could feel every ridge of his fingerprint if you focused hard enough.

_Not anymore_, you say. Your voice sounds so strange, even to yourself. You wonder if he can tell the state you’re in.

Without warning, without you even thinking to be concerned about it, he puts his lips to the scar and starts to drop small kisses all along the length of it. You wonder how wasted he must be right now to be letting any part of his skin touch any of yours. And then you have more pressing concerns to worry about because god, the amount of drugs you’re on yourself, you’ve been on a knife’s edge for _days_ and the feel of his lips might just be enough to send you flying over the edge.

You need to tell him to stop, like _right now _before you ruin everything, but then he presses a kiss to the center of the scar, cold nose just barely brushing against your skin, and that’s it, it’s too late, you’re gone.

_Oh_, you think blearily, floating somewhere high above yourself, every synapse screaming _toomuchtoomuch_. It’s heaven up there, and the descent back to earth is long and beautiful.

_Am sorry_, you say after you’ve come down a little. _Did not mean to_.

_It’s okay_, he says with a shocked little laugh, looking down to where his arm is still balanced across your stomach.

He fetches a washcloth from the bathroom and cleans you off, undresses you and helps you into fresh pajamas, so gentle it makes you want to cry. The way you always used to clean him, take care of him, when you were children. He can’t take his eyes off you, just looking and looking. You wonder if you’re hallucinating all of this. You fall asleep soon after and dream of nothing at all.

xiv. The year that Theo’s gone buying back his changelings is torture. Partly because you’re spending most of that time in a nightmarish cycle of getting clean and relapsing again – over and over – but also, quite simply, because you _miss _him.

That week or so in your flat in Antwerp, and the handful of weeks in Amsterdam before it, were like something out of a fairy tale. One of those dark and unsettling ones, the Grimm brothers or something, rather than the sanitized Disney versions you and Theo used to watch while you ate pot brownies that tasted like shit because neither of you really knew how to work an oven – but a fairy tale nonetheless.

When Theo leaves on a red-eye for New York, it feels like the literal, actual end of the world. You wonder how it’s possible the human body can cry this much without, like, drying out entirely. You wonder, very seriously, how you managed to go so many years without him.

The time passes, as time often does, even as you wallow and slog through the days. When he texts you that he’ll be home in a few weeks for good, the world gets a little brighter around the edges. A deadline is good. A deadline means a countdown, a goal to strive towards.

A deadline means you have limited time to find your way to Hobart and Blackwell again, charm your way into the old man’s good graces, and insert yourself neatly and irrevocably into Theo’s life in the Big Apple – which, incidentally, is a nickname that makes absolutely no sense.

It turns out, thankfully, that none of these things are all that difficult to achieve.

xv. You don’t think about Amsterdam if you can help it. Not the first part, anyway, bookended on one side by losing the painting – _again! _– in a damp parking garage and on the other by pulling Theo, limp and bradypneic, from the hotel mattress and bringing him back to life by terror and spite alone.

Every time you find yourself lying awake at night, images of Theo’s blue-gray skin pressing insistently on the backs of your retinas, you force yourself down the stairs into the workshop basement and polish another table, sand another chair until you no longer remember the exact temperature of Theo’s skin when you felt his wrist to check for a pulse. 

You don’t really “get” it, the whole furniture thing, but you understand the merits of repetitive labor, of completing a task and looking back on a job well done with a firm sort of pride. It’s nice and strangely humbling, too, to know that your hands are good for more than throwing punches and pulling triggers.

Incidentally, the look on Theo’s face – when he stumbles down into the workshop one bleary Sunday morning after he returns from his grand apology tour to see you working a band saw around a particularly tricky curve on a table leg – makes everything worth it.

xvi. _I want to go somewhere_, you say one afternoon. _Need to get out_ – arms sweeping wide in some all-encompassing gesture. Hobie huffs a soft reprimand as your outstretched fingertips come within inches of the table he’s coating with chemical-smelling varnish.

_Get out?_ Theo asks softly from across the room. The hurt in his voice is carefully masked by his impassive expression, obvious only to you. It’s hard to tell whether he’s tamping down his emotions for your sake or because Hobie is here – god bless Theo, somehow always twice as repressed around his old poofter for some reason.

_You know you can leave whenever_, says Theo like the words are being wrenched from him, pulled teeth and broken bones.

_Not leave, _you say, _just get out of big city for a few hours_.

_Oh_, Theo says, obviously relieved, but embarrassed to say so.

_I think that could be good for you two_, Hobie says, sharing a knowing look with you as Theo stews in his own blurry emotions across the room.

_I agree_, you tell him in a way that makes it sound like _Thank you_.

Theo looks up sharply, surprise evident in the tense line of his shoulders. _You want me to come with you?_ he asks.

_Of course_, you say. You hold up one pointer finger. _Remember? Cannot drive myself_.

Hobie, bless him, chuckles at that. It cuts through the chemical fog of the workshop like the friendliest kind of knife.

xvii. He drives you out to some big forested park up by Woodstock. It’s a long enough drive that you fall asleep, Hudson River glittering like diamonds outside your window. By the time you stop, it’s late afternoon and the sun is hanging heavy over the belly of the clouds.

_Fuck are we, Potter?_

He shakes out his shoulders, cracks each of his knuckles in turn. _You said you wanted to get out of the city_, he says.

You look over at him and feel, very distinctly and all at once, the sheer weight of all the things that have ever happened to either of you, between you, among you.

As the sun sets, you both lie back on the hood of the car, ticking like a heartbeat as it cools down. The stars begin to blink to life, one after another, the full moon hanging like a big glass eye in the pitch black sky staring down at you.

_So many stars_, you say. _Like pinholes into heaven_.

Theo hums in response. The back of his hand is very warm where it brushes against your own. A strange sort of melancholy rushes over you in a wave. You have been living together, sleeping together for the better part of a year and though you’re both still so young, not yet thirty, you can’t help but feel with a sharp pang of panic that you’ve already wasted too much time. Something in your breathing must give you away because Theo grabs onto your hand properly and tilts his head against yours.

_What are you thinking about?_ he asks.

_Nothing_, you say. _Youth, mostly_.

Apropos of nothing, or perhaps by way of response, he says, _Do you remember when you wanted to run away to California?_

You laugh. _Of course. Good idea, at the time._

_You know, I’ve still never been_, he says.

_Me either, _you say. _Maybe someday still. Would like to see the redwoods – biggest trees in whole world_.

Theo is very still against you, building up to say something. You wait it out.

_Maybe_, he says, _after the holidays, when the shop is less busy – maybe we can go._

You don’t know what to say, but you’ve been practicing in the mirror for months now for a moment just like this.

_Theo_, you say, the syllables still coming out a little muddled and very un-American, despite your best efforts. The look he gives you is bug-eyed, profound.

_Yes, yes_, you say. _Have been practicing. Very hard to say your name in my mouth_.

His hand around yours is shaking. _Anyway, yes. Would love to go to California with you, see redwoods and Pacific Ocean. Maybe find little house that does not cost so much money? Have vacation home like wealthy American businessmen, yes? _

You cut yourself off as another thought occurs to you. _Sea lions! _you say. _Would very much like to – _

Your words peter out as he kisses you, hungry and overwhelming.

_Theo_, you say again as you break apart. It’s a little easier this time. _You are so excited about sea lions?_

He never kisses you in public, not even somewhere in the woods at night with not a single other person around.

_Boris_, he says. _I love you_.

His eyes shine brighter than the moon above you as you lean back down to kiss him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy two-month anniversary to me reading The Goldfinch for the first time (July 25-29th, 2019). We're very happy together.
> 
> I'm on tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/boxedblondes).


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